cricket

Do you think Ricky Ponting has enough confidence in his team? How big a target will he set England before he can breathe easily at the thought that the opposition can't win? Will 700 be enough? Maybe he'll bat till tea-time Sunday and hope that even Australia's bowlers can contain Strauss and Cook to less than 800 runs in four sessions.

Australia 602/9, England 53/3. We've been there before. Many times.

What if Freddie had won the toss yesterday? And said "this pitch has a bit of life in it, we'll bowl first"? Yeah well, what if he decided to have a bat? Maybe they would have gotten 400 and felt happy with themselves.

Instead, they batted second... starting about an hour before stumps on the second day. They might make 400. In fact, they need 403 to avoid the follow-on. That's not looking too good right now.

Just over an hour of bedtime listening late last night for me, with MP3 audio summaries from the ABC, BBC, Guardian, Telegraph and CricInfo. The BBC, Guardian and Telegraph are all producing special daily podcast programs.

The ABC's Ashes podcast feed consists of a collection of four clips, being the stumps summary, two press conference interview and a radio highlights package. All of the ABC's material is also available for download from the Cricket Australia site (which does not have a podcast feed).

Throughout the Ashes, I'll be watching the Prime Ministerial website for cricketing references in John Winston Howard's media interviews. I'll also be keeping score on the number of references he makes to Darfur or any other major African conflict. (As regular followers of this blog will already be aware, the number of times that John Howard has used the word "Darfur" in public as recorded either in Hansard or in the pm.gov.au transcript archives currently stands at zero.)

Let's kick it off with JWH's interview with Virginia Trioli at 2BL ABC Local Radio Sydney on November 13: